Her wider appeal may have been jeopardized because she wrote characters that broke commonly-held stereotypes of White Northerners and Southerners
The lack of widespread acknowledgement or recognition for Harriet E. Wilson, the first African American novelist and author of Our Nig (1859), comes as a surprise. A New Englander, Wilson reclaimed in her work the domestic, maternal, and liberating space of 19th century women’s fiction. She constructed a fiction which…
